Wednesday, 7 July 2010

The sea is calm to-night, The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the Straits; -- on the FrenchToast, the lightSyrup gleams but a moment,And is goneDown the hatch; for it is the light of France.The cliffs of England stand Made all of cardboard; a handClaps by itself. It gives itself a standing ovation.

Sophocles long agoHeard it on the Aegean, and it broughtInto a his mindA state of crashing ignorance.

Strait of Dover: satellite photo by NASA, 2004

Cape Gris Nez, French coast: photo by Rolf Süssbrich, 2006

II...French Toast

I have not eaten French toastIn this century, but I rememberEating French toast.I get the ideaI am rememberingFrom a theory.No, not a theory, a feeling.A feelingI experienced long,Long ago, by the Aegean perhaps, or beneath The white cliffs of DoverAs the moonLay fair.When I remember reading Dover Beach, By which I mean when I readDover Beach In my mind, these days, Which I sometimes do,It's like that itch you can't scratch,A memory passes across my mind like a shadowAnd is gone, takingMatthew Arnold, His poem, The history of English poetry, England, The English language,Greek tragedy,Sophocles,The Aegean,The Straits of Dover,All the waterBetween Cap Gris NezAnd Cap FinisterreAnd meAnd you, sleepingIn the room next to me Along with it.

On second thought,No, not taking you. I wish you were here.I have lit incense.The moon lies fair.It is almost time for breakfast.

17 comments:

I have found a kind of magic in Dover I never found in any other scene. I was lucky enough as to watch those white walls with my very eyes and they just took my breath away. Crossing the Strait was quite an adventure on a weary ferry facing the uneasy waves. And yet, that is the way I set foot on England. I felt like William the Conqueror getting to the promised land.

Those memories were getting rusty in my heart until I read your enticing poem =)

Lucy, I saw quite a bit of those Cliffs on wobbly little short-hop DC-3 flights back & forth across the Channel in the early mid/sixties. The landing strips were golf courses and fields and the flights were exceptionally bumpy. So the Cliffs sometimes looked a bit too near for comfort.

Here is Matthew Arnold himself, reciting his poem to us. How convenient. The mouth movements remind one of the curious facial distension one sees in photos of test pilots breaking the sound barrier. He really gives his all for us here, does old Matthew.

As to the French Toast, my dear Radish, er, I'm not that hungry yet. "Pain perdu" means of course "lost bread". "Lost" as in "stale".

New professional responsibilities caused me to reacquire a Blackberry, which has been functioning mainly as a (re)oppressor until French Toast In Two Takes popped up this morning and made me smile. As I read and observed, the levers suddenly began to move, the planes and mirrors to shift, and the slots, folds, bends and sockets lined up nicely and quietly, no spindling or mutilation whatsoever. This was a marvelous meditation on memory and examination of self that hit me just right on this confusing, sweltering day in the northeast. Because I have a 12-year old daughter at home, I have tasted French toast during this century (I don’t need it, but it’s irresistible), but I’ve never actually eaten French pain perdu, such as the preparation pictured, either in France or at home. It looks terrific (so do the White Cliffs of Dover and Cape Gris Nez). Recently we’ve been able to buy wonderful Grade B maple syrup from Vermont and Massachusetts, which used to be hard to find. It’s darker and richer than the supposedly superior Grade A syrup, but it definitely gleams for a moment and is gone, down the hatch.

SWEET. coast/toast, fruit, syrup and creme anglais, those photos of white cliffs and straits from satellite are, well, "awesome" --- time passes, we keep on reading (but who else around here is reading Arnold these days?). Meanwhile, more on another channel here . . . .

7.8

grey whiteness of fog against invisible ridge, red-tailed hawk calling in rightforeground, no sound of wave in channel

what is not shown insofar as something, changes what

ways moment, passage of time and facts, “being taken”

grey-white of fog reflected in channel,cormorant flapping across toward ridge

Sorry your comment missed my addled attention until I found it in the inbox this morning and then found it gone on the blog. I try to be prompt in responding to those I am lucky enough to be hearing from, tardiness is rude and embarrassing because it implies ingratitude and disrespect whereas the actual problem is just the witless state of the clodger. That is an amalgam of blogger and codger which I have just coined to suit the circumstance.

In any event I hope you will not mind my reposting your comment!

My suggesting that my readers are anything less than amply literate would be an insult not only to them but to myself since what else are we doing here but reading and talking with each other. I knew Kathy Acker when she was a college girl and played catch with Flaubert when he was in short pants yet have not myself learned the first thing about how to be a writer or a reader for that matter, I am merely lost in my dreams. Which I don't even have. When I was in school at Ann Arbor my landlord was a weird Dargeresque fellow whose mother had never let him play with anything but Teddy Roethke's tubers, and that's how things came to be as they are today. As for Heidegger, if I were to be forced to read a a page of Heidegger right now I would break out in spots. I have broken out in spots anyway. My point is, you are a genius writer and I am deeply jealous (not).

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Radish King has left a new comment on your post "French Toast in Two Takes":

I'm reading. Constantly and well. I'm reading Theodore Roethke and Heidegger and Keats (I have to sneak this one of my student's parents have a rare 1st edition and I read poems to my student during his lesson) and Avital Ronell next to Flaubert and Kathy Acker and Robert Lowell and a few journals and I just finished The History and Influence of the American Psychiatric Association which begins at the Civil War and just goes on. Research you know. Ha. I have library cards for 4 different counties and I use them all.

You are such a gentleman but I am inclined to blush. I pulled my comment not because of tardiness on your part but because of uncertainty on my part. I felt it made me sound like a putz. Thank you for your response though. I took think comments unanswered are nervous making in some way. It happens to me all the time.xo